Richard Garriot is the somewhat eccentric (and by that I mean a self-insert loving, magical and soon to be space-travelling) man behind such games as the Ultima series… and that’s pretty much it. But not any more, as he polished himself off and got to work on Tabula Rasa. A clean slate as it were for someone so associated with the more classical swords and sorcery vein of roleplaying games.

And that was totally a pun, for you see that is the meaning of the term ‘Tabula Rasa’, though that clean slate is not quite as clean as we’d all think considering the game used to be JAGFMMORPG. That’s acronymese for Just Another Generic Fantasy MMORPG. Jag-fmm-orp-guh, if you want my opinion on pronunciation. Until they decided to frantically get rid of all of that and come up with Starship Troopers: The MMO.

After somewhat incessantly badgering the NC Soft staff at Bristol Comic Expo 2008 for details on a trial for Richard Garriot’s Tabula Rasa (And that’s Tab-ula Rasa, instead of ‘Tabu-la Rasa’ as I used to pronounce it), their Creative Concepts Manager and utterly nice guy Stephen Reid posted about the 5 day trials for Tabula Rasa, I popped on over to the Total Video Games website to register and get myself a code.

One handy install later via the Play NC launcher (Which could have been avoided if I remembered the TR pre-order disc sitting under my bed) and I was ready to go. The game flagged up that my Direct X was a bit out of date, so one quick update later, and I’m ready to log into the game!

After the NCSoft and Destination Games logos, we got to the usual NCSoft quality and style FMV intro where we follow the narration of the female protagonist, Sarah Morrison, who bares an uncanny resemblance in my opinion to Millia Jovovich. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Somewhat gladly, she only ticks the standard cliche box of having a tight uniform, but then again many of the characters, male or female, have tight uniforms. This is no Lara Croft with lasers. The pun with ‘Clean Slate’ and Tabula Rasa is made with the closing sentence of the FMV, but we can forgive a pun, right?

Log in time, and that went off without a hitch after adding my trial key to my somewhat bursting at the seams PlayNC Master Account, and I got to the server screen. Several US servers and one EU server that had it’s population at orange (at least it wasn’t at Blackwatch Plaid. Obscure Harvey Birdman reference there for you.) I’m guessing Centarius was the Kat Slater tan colour due to the trial codes that others and myself were utilizing. Moving on to the character select screen.

As a certified altoholic, 16 character slots pleases my greatly, and I head in to one of my favourite parts of MMO gaming, character creation. Humans are the only race you can play at first, though the other three races aren’t exactly races, more the result of Human-Alien relations that we haven’t seen since the Original Series of Star Trek. Kirk, that randy dog. Brann, Forean and Thrax hybrids aren’t unlocked until you get some kind of DNA splicing ability in game, so I decided to go with the only option in this case, the bog standard human.

The customization options for your character could be considered moderate, if you consider Final Fantasy XI to be as customizable as a piece of generic pop music, and City of Heroes to be a game of Dress up and Nip/Tuck on mental stimulants. There’s certainly more options than World of Warcraft, my not so secret shame. 49 different face options for both male and female characters, 14 hair styles, 9 different facial hair types for men and 9 different types of neck accessory for women, and a variety of goggles you could stick on. These ranged from high tech to being a false disguise kit missing the large nose, moustache and shaggy eyebrows.

I played about for a while and came up with a reasonable looking young man who bears some similarity to one of my City of Heroes characters, who as you can see here is peering at the screen wondering what kind of disfiguring alterations I’m going to put him through.

There are 7 different sets of armour you can flick between, or any combination of those 7 for torso, hands, legs and feet, and the colour selection for all the features are done with a handy colour wheel. While this is better than some as you no longer lack that right shade and hue for feature x, it does make selecting the very same colour to be rather annoying on some pieces, requiring fiddling and jiggling with the mouse and a lot of peering at the screen.

There’s also a slider that you can use to adjust whether you class as shrimpily short or titanically tall, but as for any other dimensions, you’re out of luck. This does mean less of the massively breasted girls who would be destined for spine and posture issues and a lot of back ache.

Anyway, happy with my character, I entered his name and then discovered something odd. The family name, when set, is the same for -all- your characters. Hmm. I didn’t feel like being stuck with the name ‘Andrews’ for the rest of my gaming life if I decided to go on and play it, so poor Ryan Andrews was cast back to remain a CoH character, and the perrenial favourite of the Rolando family was brought in. More fiddling later, and the blue haired Hannah Rolando was ready to depart into the game.

Now, a slight pause here to discuss the family name thing. As I said, I’m an altoholic. But I’m also a Roleplayer, and all of my characters being related is something that doesn’t sit quite right with me in the way of roleplaying expression. But c’est la vie, there isn’t much I can do about that now.

It was time to log in, or ‘enter battle’ as the game so put it. The loading screen contained information about the newbie starting zone I was being sent to, the standard tidbit of information at the botom of the screen. And then nothing happened once the bar reached 100%.

No, don’t worry, it wasn’t a crash. The game has an ‘Enter Battle’ button that you can press to head in, which means no getting ganked if you quickly have to go AFK while zoning or logging in. For those that this would infuriate, there is a small check box on the loading screen that lets you automatically join the fray once loaded.

And so Hannah Rolando stood in the battlefield, ready to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and she was all out of gum, and instead of kicking she’d be using your generic starter weapon, in this case a pistol.

I did start off running at 1152×864 on Maximum, but that was me being optimistic, and by optimistic I mean damn right insane. Ultra was a little better, but I eventually settled on High.

The starting quest and NPC’s all dispensed that handy knowledge to me about how to do the simple, basic things in life. Walking, running, looking about, accessing my HUD and sending a crate to meet it’s maker with Generic Starter Pistol. The NPC’s have voices, and thankfully unlike some games I can mention (Resident Evil, Phantasy Star Universe) they voice talent is fairly decent.

The UI and HUD themselves are pretty industry standard, except for the odd matter of the chat window being in the top left corner by default, instead of bottom right like nearly every other MMO out there. Other than this, the controls are fairly standard for the illegitimate child of a MMO and FPS. WASD movement, mouselook, left mouse button fire weapon, right mouse button use skill. Alternative Fire for weapons is mapped to F, but from the options it’s fairly easy to remap keybindings.

Here’s a quick Screencap of the UI.

Aside from the oddly placed chat window, everything else is in its standard position. Bringing up the UI or the radial menu with the Ctrl key disables mouselook and gives you a cursor to interact with the menus.

The first mission after the basic one involves blowing up a crashed dropship and taking down 3 of the Bane. Now, this is where you get your true taste of combat, and where things for me got a little odd. It looks like a third person shooter, in the same vein as Gunz: The Duel and Exteel.

But it isn’t. Running about trying to strafe, do a barrel roll (Yeah, I went there) and such didn’t do jot. If you’re partially or fully concealed then that affects their chance to hit, but other than that… it’s mostly lock on and shoot for your life. It can really throw you until you get used to it, I found.

Still, they went down and I got a Starter Quest Shotgun for my troubles. Now, this truly is my Boomstick. The next mission involved liberating a fortress from the hands of an evil power. Weapons of Mass Destruction were not found, however, but considering how much of a beating some of the enemies could take before going down, I doubt they’d need it. Fortunately, your own resilience and constitution are pretty legendary. It’s not even a flesh wound at times.

Operation: Liberation was successful, and I was already Level 3 by now, though it took me a while to work out I had attribute and skill points, and a bit longer to work out what went where and did what. The tooltip help was a little Spartan in places, as was the in-game help manual from what I could tell. Probably something I’d be able to find on the offical website, but who RTFM’s anymore?

I also was earning something called Prestige, but I’m still not quite sure what it does. Whether or not I could sent it to my CoH characters for use in their supergroup bases is up for debate.

After the fabled three quarters of an hour break to load up on IRN-BRU and Quavers, the food of squaddies the world(s) over, it was back into the fight which sent me into a cave to attack the darkness. And by that I mean get my first bit of Lego… wait, Logos. Logos is a mysterious power which was endowed to various races by a benevolent race of aliens, and your PC is one of the many who can harness this ability. After blasting my way through Bane, I could now chuck lightning like any true Sith Lord, and blasted my way out of the cave.

Now, at this point I shall mention that the graphics could be a little glitchy at times. People suddenly popping into view and some other mild issues, but seeing as this was followed by a graphics crash, it may have just been the card in the test PC.

One thing to note as well is that Tabula Rasa has integrated voice chat it seems for groups, or squadrons. You know, that social thing where you get with a bunch of friends and strangers and put your car keys in a bowl.

Or start fragging xenoscum while in combat armour. Still, not had a chance to try it, but this is still only a 2 hour first impressions review, and I still have 4ish days left to try the game some more. Which I will, but on with the show.

The learning curve for getting to grips to the game seems about standard, misconceptions about combat system aside, and the chat system certainly seems to take inspiration from World of Warcraft’s, which isn’t a bad thing as it has a fairly robust system.

The final training mission involved blasting my way through a horde of Bane as they attempted to take back the base I stole from them in a 80’s Action Flick Style of Lone Gunman Against All Odds (Those NPC’s don’t count. They’re just redshirts), and several pitched skirmishes later I emerged victorious, if dripping in alien fluids. Bow-chika-wow-wow.

A brief network issue took me out of the game to find I had failed this mission even though all objectives apart from report back in were completed, so you may want to keep that in mind when doing some of the missions in Tabula Rasa, should you choose to play it. But with that mission done, I had earned my wings and been granted authority to leave Newbie Zone for the real game via Dropship, and that is what I did.

In a new area, the game quickly fell into the standard MMO fare of quests. Run here, talk to person x, run there, talk to person y, go here and kill/examine z, return, go and speak to… well, you get the idea. Having noticed that time was progressing in its usual linear fashion, and I was nearing the two hour mark, I wandered back to base camp to set myself down and look at the pretty terrain before logging. I saw many other fellow warriors with the <TRIAL ACCOUNT> mark in gold next to their name, along with non-trial people going about their business, and even spotted a friend in game I had been chatting to on IRC and informed them about the trial for, so perhaps some teaming will need to be done there.

If I was asked by a netizen to quantify the qualities of the game in numeric form, I’d kindly tell them to choke on a percentile and have fractions bury under their skin, because trying to apply abstract and subjective opinions to numbers is sick and wrong.

But if asked to summarise what I thought, I’d say this, after listing the specifications of my partner in crime, the PC.

Unity – Zortel’s handsome personal computer.

CPU: Intel Core Duo 2 2.66ghz RAM: 1×2gb Kingston DDR2 Hard Drives: System Disk: Hitachi 160gb Drive – Install Disk: Maxtor 400gb Drive Graphics Card: ATi Radeon x1650 512mb

Graphics: Pretty, with a good sense of art direction for the areas from what I’ve seen in game and in trailers, though could probably do with a bit of optimization in places and some issues with characters sorted. Alt-tabs well, which is more than can be said for FFXI and CoH/V.

Sound: Musically, it’s your fairly average Sci-FI movie soundtrack from what I experienced. That’s not to say it’s bad. It fits the genre and can help get you in the mood in battle, but it’s nothing spectacular. SFX wise, the effects have a bang to them and are very meaty, which also helps with the immersion. The voice talent from NPC’s and allies is better than some games out there and generally in style with the setting. That is to say grizzled war veterans.

Gameplay: A little less twitchy than I thought, though I’m still getting to grips with it. It’s certainly frantic, and easy to lose sight of what’s going on in the heat of battle when you have hordes of aliens charging at you with guns blazing. I’ll be looking to play more though. Quests seem to range from action-y to your usual MMO staple.

And that’s that done. Two hours of Tabula Rasa, my first impressions of the game, and a lot of rambling as well. Am I going to play till my trial runs out? More than likely, yes. Then I may or may not pick up a retail copy to continue the fight. But what do I know? I’m just a gamer, and this is all subjective. The free trial is there and has been linked to, so go and give it a shot.

NC Soft are also releasing Starter Packs for all their games. A copy of the client on disc, 14 days of free play, and only £1.99? Is that a good deal? I’d say it’s a great deal.

So now I leave you to your own thoughts, and leave the brave new recruit Hannah Rolando to hers as she looks off into the distance, shotgun slung over one shoulder.

“It’s a tough fight… and I’m scared too, y’know? I could run away, easily, but… maybe I should keep on the front lines. For Dad. It’s what he did back ‘home’…”